Part of a Plan
by kosovaheartland
Summary: Oneshot, inspired by the last few scenes of Last Christmas. The doctor ponders upon growing old and its implications for his relationship with Clara.


**So I'm warning you now, this is no masterpiece. I wrote this in an hour and a half on a tablet in the back of my parents car on the way to my grandparents' with Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran on repeat, after watching the Christmas special. And it's underdeveloped and it's a bit ropey in places, but I'm meant to be revising and concentrating on my multichap at the moment, so I'm going to leave it as it is. But first I'm going to explain why I wrote this, because I think it's a bit weird and it probably makes more sense in context. **

**I get get a lot of messages from readers of my other fanfiction about bringing emotions through in writing, and as I've said then, I'm lucky enough that I haven't experienced half of the hell I write about in that. What I haven't said to most people is that I probably do draw from personal experience a little in terms of developing emotions, and there are a few things I draw on, one of which inspired this one shot.**

**On 7th August 2012, my incredibly active, picture of health 80 year old grandfather was weeding his flowerbeds in his back garden. At some point, he had a massive stroke. As soon as my grandmother realised she called an ambulance, but we were warned when he was admitted to hospital that it was a massive stroke and it didn't look good. He came in with no movement down his right side, no speech and no real ability to communicate, and when I visit him tomorrow he will be in exactly the same state as he was then. We think he has some very limited understanding of what's being said to him, but we don't know. He can't talk to us, he can't write, he can't communicate whatsoever, but he is most certainly alert and perfectly aware of the state that he's in. There's nothing anyone can do, charities aren't interested because there's no treatment that will help him, and there's very little he can actually do to pass time. In short, it's a totally crap situation, and there's shit all anyone can do about it. And it's a rotten way for anyone to spend the last years of their life when until the day it happened they were a picture of perfect health. **

**Every day since he was transferred to a nursing home, my grandmother has visited him, day in, day out for the last two and a half years, giving up practically all of her own social life to do so. She can't make it better, they can't have a conversation, and it upsets her no end, and it's so far from the life they both had before. But they've been together since their twenties and she wouldn't dream of not going in to see him, she just wouldn't. And if that isn't love, I don't know what is.**

There's something undeniably cruel about this whole human business of growing old.

It's not exclusively human, of course. Ageing is a perfectly natural process in each and every race to which the universe has given life, a curse, of sorts, a small-print so easily pushed to one side in youth and yet so uncomfortably looming, threatening, with each passing year beyond middle age. It's perhaps the most natural process therpe is in that same universe, for nothing could exist without a beginning, and inevitably with the creation of that beginning must come an ending.

By that logic, old age is a fact of life itself, a condition, the price every being to live and to die must pay as a consequence. It seems such a small price to pay for the blessing of being alive in youth, he ponders to himself now as he watches her sleep, because at over a thousand he is still in his youth, really, within the context of his own people.

Time lords are not like humans. Time lords are as infinite as their remaining regenerations allow, have the ability to defy old age and the death that comes at its conclusion provided they have a new face left in them, another chance at this game, this circle of life and existence (and isn't that just horribly ironic, when he finds himself once again the last one left?)

Humans are fragile, short-lived, not like time lords at all in that respect. They may bear a physical resemblance, and perhaps that's why he enjoys their company so, but each of their single beating hearts is doomed to be so short-lived and brief in comparison to those of a time lord.

Perhaps that's why he runs from them, all in good time. He's never thought of it quite like that before, never cocked up the timing of his return to a companion quite so badly that he's been forced to confront it.

He's not familiar with old age as it manifests itself to human beings, that's the truth of the matter. He was born into a world in which old age wasn't a death sentence, in which the moment the twin hearts of one body proved broken beyond repair regeneration energy allowed for the blessing of a new one, kicked in just in time for the whole process to start over again. It comes to an end eventually of course- and he knows that better than most, having lived out old age in the belief he had reached the end of his circle, his chances- but it's such a far-off prospect for such a long time that it doesn't have to be confronted until a time lord has grown so old and weary of that repetitive cycle that death comes as something of a welcome comfort.

Humans live such short existences that to them, old age cannot be viewed quite like that. Humans have a shelf life too short for them to feel so finished with it all and satisfied enough to give in to eternal sleep by the time it comes around; and rightly so, or so he sees it, because how can one see all they wish to see in less than a century, how can a life lived in short a time as that possibly fulfil every potential, every desire? It can't, of course, it's a ludicrous concept. The harsh reality of the matter is that the average life expectancy of a human being can never and shall never allow not one individual to be everything they could have ever been, and in most cases the last decade or so of that already limited lifetime will be spent in a state of disrepair in which that individual simply cannot enjoy everything they did before, thanks to that timeless curse of old age.

Thinking about it now, that's why he runs. He can't quite bear the thought of watching his beloved companions fade away, fall victim to cancer and to strokes and to heart disease and to the rest of the seemingly never-ending list of human medical conditions, of genetic predisposition and sheer bad luck.

He's thought it was for the best, all this time. He's thought since the first time he pulled his abandonment routine and flew off into the depths of however far away he could that he was doing the right thing, that it would simply be too painful for both parties to live out their time so out of synch in their old age, for them to grow old and useless and ever-closer to their inevitable fate whilst he remained youthful within, lives left to live, whatever age his appearance might depict. It would be better to part before all that could begin, he had told himself each time, better for all of them and indeed himself, without exception.

It was never meant to go like that; that dream-state scenario presented to him today. It was never meant to go like that; God knows in the past he's taken every precaution possible to ensure it doesn't, it couldn't. Subconsciously, it now seems, but still so, he made up his mind a long time ago never to visit his companions in their old age, never to put either parties involved through that painful reminder of how some things change so much while others change so little, everything they didn't do before that they couldn't do in that moment because the whole nature of humanity is just so short and horribly cruel. That was a painful reality he wished never to confront, to brush away and forget about by keeping his human friends around only as long as that terrible curse of old age could possibly permit.

He confronted it today, of course. Clara, his Clara, forced him to confront it today, and the honest truth of the matter is it wasn't quite what he's been so afraid of all these years.

Seeing his Clara having grown old without him, no longer in any fit state to come away with him again as had always been the basis of their friendship, has had an entirely different effect upon him than he had always imagined this type of scenario might, and the aftermath is a little confusing, as he ponders internally.

It didn't matter to him. He had always thought it would, always believed so adamantly that to see his companions so aged and withered and frail would hurt him like nothing less, cause him to run and never look back to avoid that truth.

Not Clara; that's what he's learnt today.

Not her, not his Clara.

Never his Clara.

She had asked him how he could not see her any different in her old age-her dream-like state had, at least- and he wonders if perhaps she hadn't picked up on the greater significance of his reply, but the truth is that answer he gave her then, so convinced he was truly too late and trapped within his personal nightmare (oh, the irony) says it all, says everything this socially awkward body would struggle so hopelessly to say.

The truth is that he's never seen her as physically beautiful, not in this lifetime. Perhaps his previous body might have seen her so, might have harboured a secret desire to hold her close and kiss under a thousand stars, but that absolutely doesn't mean in the slightest that this old awkward successor doesn't fall a little more in love with her every single day.

This doctor, this grumpy old man who treated her so badly at first, only ever saw her as her, his Clara.

Her physical beauty was always so amusingly unimportant, to this time lord, at least.

How could it be anything else, when she's always been in possession of such an earth-shatteringly beautiful soul?

He's never cared for her because of the way she looks, of course he hasn't. And it's for that reason that seeing her so old and fragile changes nothing, could never possibly have changed anything, not even had that dream been not a dream at all.

Not with Clara Oswald. His Clara is the sole exception that proves his carefully considered rule, the one for whom he would change nothing, nothing at all. Her legs might not work like they used to before but her eyes still smile in the same way they did when she was sixty two years younger, when she was externally beautiful as she sees it, to match the inner elegance of her soul.

He would do it for her. For her, he realised in those moments of believing that dream to be reality, their reality, for her he would have stayed and she wouldn't even have had to ask. He would have stayed because he realises now that he needs her in a way he hadn't known it was possible to need another being before, because deep in that same subconscious that concealed his fear of this old she for so long he realises he needs her inexplicably, that no one else will do and no matter how she ages, that won't change, can't change.

He'd have stayed with her, had it been real. He can't quite believe he feels this way because it's simply so unlike him, but he knows beyond shadow of a doubt that he would have given up everything, grounded himself in a way that might before have filled him with utter horror for the sake of staying with her, taking care of her, as that awful curse of old age slowly took her for its own.

How could he not? She's changed him, he knows that now. Clara, his Clara, with her ever-green soul, has put up with him through his worst, somehow despite his stubbornness has taught him a little, taught him things he could never have perceived as important before. Perhaps the hugs still aren't quite him but he isn't half as opposed to them as he was before,not when it's with her, not when he understands now it might hide one's expression, but it can also communicate emotions that simply can't be put into words.

He's glad he doesn't have to watch her grow old, of course. Not now, at least. He's relieved in a way he's never been so before that her time isn't up, that with his Clara he still has time to do so much, to mean so much to one another, but when the time comes he will do what she needs him to do, what he needs to do for himself, right until the end. He won't even hesitate, he realises that now.

And as he watches her sleep, her face so youthful and fresh and peaceful, it dawns upon him slowly that people fall in love in all sorts of ways, unconventional, mysterious ways.

Maybe, just maybe, it's all part of some greater plan, some destiny for the both of them.

He hadn't believed in destiny before.

Now it seems practically for certain, because how could the bringing together of them both have been simply by chance, how could they have turned out to be so dangerous and yet so perfect for each other by accident, totally free of some sort of intervention? How could this dream that's caused him to realise so much have no deeper meaning, have never intended to cause him to realise so totally the lengths he's prepared to go to for her, the sacrifices he would and will make?

It's not perfect. Perhaps there's no such thing as perfection, he ponders, surprising even hi,self as he initiates the hug between them both, her face still soft, sleeping.

Perfection doesn't matter, old age and illness and the pain that comes with it doesn't matter; they'll work all that out when they have to, find a way trough it somehow, someday, because God knows he can't stand back and watch her grow old alone for real.

How could he run when this, here and now and always and forever, is just as perfect as it's ever going to be?


End file.
